Conor Grennan
After volunteering at the Little Princes Children’s Home in the village of Godawari in 2004, Conor Grennan eventually returned to Nepal to launch Next Generation Nepal (NGN), a nonprofit organization dedicated to reconnecting trafficked children with their families. He resides in Connecticut with his wife and two children. Visit his website here.
LITTLE PRINCES: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal (2011)
#1 on The Globe and Mail bestseller list for two months The New York Times, Independent, and Nation best-seller.
In search of adventure, twenty-nine-year-old Conor Grennan embarked on a yearlong journey around the globe, beginning with a three-month stint volunteering at an orphanage in civil war-torn Nepal. But a shocking truth would forever change his life: these rambunctious, resilient children were not orphans at all but had been taken from their families by child traffickers who had falsely promised to keep them safe from war before abandoning them in the teeming chaos of Kathmandu. For Conor, what started as a footloose ramble became a dangerous, dedicated mission to unite youngsters he had grown to love with the parents they had been stolen from—a breathtaking adventure, as Conor risked everything in the treacherous Nepalese mountains to bring the children home.
“Go buy multiple copies… invest in a miracle or two or more.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Funny, touching, tragic….A remarkable tale of corruption, child trafficking and civil war in a far away land—and one man’s extraordinary quest to reunite lost Nepalese children with their parents.”—Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts
"Grennan's work is by turns self-pokingly humorous, exciting, and inspiring."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Grennan details his personal learning curve as he went from a man motivated by making himself look good to a man obsessed with traveling across rugged terrain to reunite families, a childless man learning the joys and agonies of parenthood. He also details the incredible stories of families caught in a civil war, frightened and anxious about the future of their children, and the endearing resiliency of the children themselves, many of them traumatized by war, enslavement, and separation from their families."—Vanessa Bush, Booklist
"[An] action-packed account [!] like a good storyteller, [Conor] ensnares us with humour and adventure"—The Irish Times
"With a light touch and refreshing candour, Grennan [!] tells the story of how a good-looking University of Virginia grad with wanderlust ended up risking his life to find, then reunite, children with their families in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world"—USA Today
"Little Princes by Conor Grennan is what happens when passion, talent, and a desire to change the world spill onto the page!I defy you not to be inspired or moved by this saga"—The New York Journal of Books
"Conor Grennan shows what one person can do, if he follows his conscience and his love. By the end of this inspiring book, he has not only reunited many of the children with the parents they thought they had lost -- he has found his own love"—Dublin Evening Herald
Rights: William Morrow, North America; Commonwealth, complex Chinese; Beijing Booky, simple Chinese; Uitgeverij Forum, Netherlands; Presses de La Cite, France; Eichborn, Germany; Piemme, Italy; Woonjin Think Big, Korea; HarperCollins UK, UK; Sanskrit Co., Thailand; PT Mizan Pustaka, Indonesia; Papierowy Księżyc, Poland; Bokforlaget Nona, Sweden
WHITE BOY (IN DEVELOPMENT)
This is a story about rediscovering what home is after watching one’s own home fall apart, sometimes many times over. Born into a large family, the son of a Vassar professor, Conor moved from suburbia to a dangerous neighborhood in Jersey City after his parents divorced. He made friends from countries he’d never heard of, captained the soccer and track teams at a school that had neither a soccer field nor a track, and figured out which liquor stores in his neighborhood would sell booze to teenagers. (Hint: All of them.)
Conor also faced daily racial harassment that often turned violent, but learned to get up the next day and start again. In his two family homes, he found that keeping a disjointed family together and protecting those we love sometimes means lying. Eventually, his struggle to live as a white boy in the inner city led him to find common ground with a group of displaced orphans in Nepal whom he taught to stand up for themselves when afraid and from whom he learned far bigger lessons about life. WHITE BOY is a story of how we are taught to fight, to forgive, to love, to bind ourselves to others to make a new home while our own lies ravaged, and how we find ourselves in the process.
Rights: Union Literary